The quest for a cure for cancer has involved the expenditure of billions of dollars for research, millions of scientist hours of effort, the construction of institutions devoted to the problem and generation of a body of literature, and yet, not even the nature of the problem, let alone its solution, has been discovered.
Approaches to the seemingly neverending search have fallen into three general categories: Surgical, radiological and chemotherapeutic. Each has a modicum of success for treating certain types of tumors. Surgery, for example, can completely cure breast cancer if the operation is properly performed in the early stages of tumor growth, but will only temporarily prolong life if performed when the tumor is in advanced stages of growth. Even if breast cancer is cured by complete removal of tumor cells and the surrounding tissue, there are self-evident disadvantages to this approach.
Radiological and chemical treatment of cancer cells reduces mitotic division of cancer cells and thus reduces, if not completely inhibits the rate of tumor growth, but such treatments have several distinct and widely known disadvantages. In the first place, neither treatment is selective only to cancer cells; they damage both healthy and tumor cells. Radiological treatment is generally useful only when the tumor cells are in a relatively localized state, since any attempt to treat the body generally to control widely dispersed cancer cells would inflict great damage on the healthy cells of the host animal. Known chemotherapeutic agents such as the nitrogen mustards, because of their destructive side effects are considered a treatment of last resort to be used only when other treatments have failed.
The present invention relates to a new chemotherapeutic approach to the treatment of cancer. The problems in attempting to find a chemotherapeutic cancer cure are manifold because the chemistry of the onset of cancer is as complex as life itself. Prior investigators have generally concentrated their efforts on the development of "synthetic" chemotherapeutics, i.e., extracorporeal chemicals. Massive programs, sponsored by both governmental and private agencies, have been set up to screen old and new chemicals for anti-tumor activity and tens of thousands of chemicals have been thus examined, but to date, a cancer cure has not been discovered.